Exploring Vlingo

I have been looking at the various voice commands available with my new 3GS iPhone, which allow me to call phone numbers, call contacts in my address book, make correction (cancel, wrong, nope, no, not that), start music, play a specific playlist, play a specific artist, pause the music, skip to next song, go back to previous song, shuffle my songs, turn on Genius feature, get info about what music is playing, and get help.

Basically to activate the voice command on a 3GS iPhone, you hold down the 'home button' for a few seconds and just talk.  So far it is working pretty good.

I decided to see if there were any other apps that might be useful for voice commands and remembered I had downloaded the app 'Vlingo' and had not taken the time to explore what it had to offer.

It has some pretty neat features as well.  Besides the ability to call a contact in the address book, it had some other interesting features.  You can search Google maps by speaking:

Search the web by using Yahoo! or Google

Update your status by speaking on Facebook or Twitter.

Vlingo links to Facebook and Twitter and you have the ability to pull up your Twitter and Facebook accounts from Vlingo and view profiles, friends, messages and webpage for standard viewing.  It is a fast, efficient means to update your status on either social site, via speech that is translated to text for update and posting to either account.  The translation seems to be working effectively and without too many mistakes in translation.  I would definitely recommend this app and it is free, too!

The translation of what I spoke was so good that I decided to use it to send an email.  So I selected the 'Social' tab and tapped the 'Press + Speak' button and talked.  Then I selected the text in the bubble at the top of the screen, did a 'copy' ... moved to my email program on my iPhone and pasted it into the body of the email.   Could be cool to see how you could talk, translate to text and paste to send friends email.

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